Vail Daily letter: Business reaction to election

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Once again, Richard Carnes has been drinking the Kool-Aid that the Obama campaign folks have been serving up for the last several years.

In his column on Tuesday, "Haters still be hatin,'" Mr. Carnes basically portrays as evil capitalists those companies that must now lay off employees as a result of increased taxes and resulting lower net profits.

He asserts that they're out to make a political point by laying off people after the election, since he says they already knew they were going to fire people before the vote was ever tallied.

But he conveniently ignores the fact that this election was all about two very different scenarios for the country and economy.

I won't be as insulting, as he always is with those he disagrees with, but if he knew more about businesses, he would know that they must plan and budget for the future, and usually formulate different forecasts based on how varying outside factors might affect the business.

Clearly, Romney's plan was to generally lower taxation, lower expenditures and reduce unneeded red tape, and he would have ended Obamacare one way or another.

But since the election was obviously going to be so close, many companies had to come up with differing expense and tax scenarios based on which candidate won, and wait to see the outcome of the election to know which scenario was valid.

Now that the election has been held and it's clear we are continuing on with the Obama plan, businesses must budget accordingly, and that means significantly higher taxes and more new regulations.

Some businesses' profit margins are such that they simply can't afford to absorb all the coming new expenses and taxes, and must downsize as a result.

But they would have no reason to downsize ahead of time, when the polls were so close and the election could have gone either way.

Is it more reasonable to think that "evil businessmen" really get a kick out of laying off people and are looking for any excuse to do so, or is it more likely that businesspeople actually enjoy it when income and expenses are favorable so they can justify hiring more people and growing their businesses so they can then make more profits?

Do you really think the Steadman Clinic delayed its decision to withdraw from the Vail project until three days after the election so it could make some political point? Or is it the more likely case that it was waiting for the election results to know which world we'd be living in for the next few years, so it could determine whether the numbers would still make sense for this new project?